Tag: apache Posts

Obviously I’ve been spending a bit of time tweaking Apache such that it is well optimized for working in a VPS environment. Truthfully though, Apache is a major resource hog. To be honest, I really can’t comprehend what it’s doing with all that memory it seems to hoard. One of the other major downsides to Apache is that it forks additional processes to handle server load, and processes are rather heavy (at least when compared to user threads). Since I haven’t touched any C++ in about two months, I thought I’d try my hand at writing a quick web server to see if I can better understand some of problems. For now, I’m leveraging boost for all the threading, and just using simple select now for all the socket communication (I understand the limitations of select, and will probably move things to boost::asio when it’s all done). I originally wrote […]

So I’ve had my website on Rimu for over a week now, and so far things are going quite well. I’ve actually had a few support requests in with them, mostly trivial items, and they’ve answered everything in about 30 minutes, which is great. The one thing I’ve found out is that their base plan (which only included 160 MB of memory) just isn’t powerful enough to run more than a small WordPress site. I spent a bunch of time reducing the memory requirements of Apache and MySQL, but my efforts just weren’t successful. Every once and a while an application would crash with a kernel out of memory warning which would basically render the site inoperable. The guys at Rimu actually tried to help me make it all work, but they basically recommended upgrading the virtual server, as Apache is pretty much a memory hog. Thankfully Rimu allows you […]

There are a lot of different ways you can increase the speed of your website, even if you have relatively cheap hosting. If you’re lucky, your blogging platform already has a caching engine built in (Drupal does). If you’re unlucky, and running something like WordPress, you have to do a bit more work. Caching makes a website more responsive because it takes an expensive operation (such as a long database query) and stores it so that next time it doesn’t have to recompute it entirely. For example, when you go to this website, normally Apache would execute PHP, parse the WordPress code, do some MySQL database queries, and then finally output the HTML page. Depending on the hosting service, this may take a long time. With a cache, the final HTML page is simply written to disk (or memory if a memory cache is being used) so that when that […]

So if you hadn’t noticed, my blog has been really flaky for the last week or so. For some reason, all the hard drive space on my machine keeps disappearing, and it’s causing mysql and apache to occasionally crash. I spent a few hours this morning trying to figure it out, so hopefully it will be a bit more stable soon. As for today, I’ll probably hang out by the water for an hour or so, and then maybe do some grocery shopping. I’m going to get a membership tomorrow at the Bentall Fitness Center I think (gotta look good for Mexico right?). Looking forward to the long weekend coming up. I’d really like to get some camping in before summer ends.